A couple of days ago I by pure chance discovered a new game that I ended up finding quite a bit enjoyable, through a promotional email that Blizzard tends to bomb me with. The game is called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and it’s a digital collecting (trading) card game.

However for somebody as casual of players as my friends and I are there were several problems. First of all to keep the game somewhat fresh one has to constantly be pumping money into it. Once the initial thrill of facing your friends with your newly formed deck ends and you become familiar with their play style and their stronger moves it stops being as much fun. It also is the only way to stay competitive against other players.

Playing in clubs against other people we simply wouldn’t have time for now and after taking prolonged breaks it became hard to remember all the moves and rules. This probably sounds lame to some real trading card game fans, but that’s what it is.

All of the above things are not a problem with a digital game. You still have the thrill of opening new packs, but you can earn them without spending any real money. You can obtain them through in-game currency which is earned by doing quests and winning games.

The game itself is free to begin with as well. You get to build your custom decks from all your cards for different classes without having to reshuffle real cards and taking them apart and putting decks back together.

You get to compete against the computer with pretty good AI and best of all you get to face off real players online. And all the rules are really easy to figure out since the game basically doesn’t let you do what you can’t do and it keeps score for you and when you start it guides you through an easy to understand tutorial.

At the beginning you get one class and a crash course that makes you easily get the rules. Then you unlock other characters of other classes and then you build a couple of custom decks and compete. I started out with a priest, but now I’ve gotten pretty good with my hunter deck. I like the synergy that a lot of cards in the deck have with each other.

There is also an Arena mode and a ranked game-play. I tried both and they are also equally interesting. I can say that for such a simple game that can be played in as little as 5-15 minutes at a time it is a pretty damn addictive and fun strategy game. Now I need to coerce my real friends to join it and try it out so we could face off against each other.